Pre-emptive Procrastination

Wednesday, June 9th 2010

The time spent on something is less important than the subsconscious build up. It's often called "procrastination". You spend some time noodling around; never quite getting around to what you were supposed to do.

Procrastination is Creative

Then, all of a sudden, you do it in a rush just before it's "due".

(or eventually give up)

Oddly, what you end up doing may be quite different from what you set out to do.

The procrastination period is a period of unconscious creativity.

The instructions might be initially sent to the unconscious. But it returns something entirely different in the end.

After a period of painful procrastination.

What makes procrastination painful? The nagging sense of incompleteness? Of people nagging you? Of ...

I think the pain is cultural. Procrastination and deadlines. They work for some, but for many they're imposed by punctillious overlords.

But they are so thoroughly imposed people think it's something they're doing to themselves. They have been brain-washed.

The Scourge of Deadlines and Aims

Procrastination only exists because people insist on having aims and deadlines. They have things they want to do. Things they want to make. Schedules to meet.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it means people ignore the random, the discovered and the chaotic. They don't go where intuition or fancy take them. They proceeding down the dreary laneway of control freakery. Argh!

Yet life is random, discovered and chaotic. To try and control it with the conscious mind, with its limited processing capacity, is foolish. That dreary laneway is all well and good; until some giant, ravenous world-eating monster suddenly appears in it. Then what?

Trying to control life leads to an odd, blind type of stupidity. The one that denies that monster ever appeared. The sort that counts everything but has no idea what it's counting. The type that sets arbitray deadlines. The type that fills in forms, meets criteria, works really hard and spends a lot of time creating schedules, controlling things, classifying things ... and never quite seeing what's actually going on.

The type that says: "Ah, that monster doesn't belong in this laneway. Quickly. Ignore it. Adjust the laneway. The monster is a deviation from the mean ..."

Pre-emptive Procrastination :-)

And anyone who doesn't adhere to the laneway mentality is "lazy", "unrealiable" or "irresponsible".

Pah!

So: don't begin with an end point in mind. Begin with a hunch. Let it take you along. Then you cruise through the procrastination period without even realising you're in one. Just let the subconscious do the work for you!

In other words, procrastinate before you have anything to do. Carry on reading things, writing things, talking to people, building things, and so on, but with no end in mind. Just hunches, feelings, and a sense of something just out of sight. Then you end up with a result you never quite expected.